We’ve learned from the field that excellent schools—led by leaders who focus on continuous improvement grounded in data and evidence—are what help students succeed most. Data-driven continuous improvement helps schools decide which approaches best address their biggest challenges to driving student achievement.
In this “Heroes in the Field” blog post and video, co-chair Bill Gates sits down with Sacramento Superintendent Jorge Aguilar in a one-on-one interview in which Aguilar shares his background, his experience connecting students to college options while at Fresno Unified School District, and how he is using data-driven continuous improvement in Sacramento to keep more low-income students and students of color on track to graduation.
Aguilar’s efforts in Sacramento are a great example of how district leaders are working to build a culture and mindset around using data and continuous learning to improve outcomes for Black, Latino, and low-income students. We’re excited to see how Superintendent Aguilar applies these approaches in Sacramento, and how other districts and schools use data in innovative ways to drive continuous improvement. We hope you’ll consider sharing the interview video and blog with friends and colleagues. Below are social media assets you can use. You can also look for content posted on Twitter @gatesed.
Today, more than ever before, parents, educators and stakeholders around the country are learning about the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and the opportunities it presents for school districts to innovate learning in their classrooms and to address academic achievement gaps—through the pages and websites of the Black Press.
“It’s critical for [Black] parents to be involved and the Black Press is strategically embedded in our communities, so that we have more opportunities to get the word out about ESSA,” said Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., the president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA). “The NNPA is pleased to partner with and applauds the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for working to raise public awareness throughout the United States about equity in education.”
Chavis continued: “Bridging the academic gap in education, in particular for African American students and others from disadvantaged communities, is of critical importance.”
Dr. Elizabeth V. Primas, the project manager for the NNPA ESSA awareness campaign and a life-long educator, said that ESSA was established to help increase the effectiveness of public education in every state.
ESSA, which reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary School Act (ESEA) and replaces the No Child Left Behind Act, received bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Obama on December 10, 2015.
Under ESSA, states have more flexibility to craft elementary and secondary education programs designed to improve educational outcomes in the nation’s public schools. The law also ensures that every child, regardless of race, income, background, or where they live, has the opportunity to obtain a high-quality education.
“Education is the pathway out of poverty,” Primas said.
Since receiving the Gates Foundation grant, the NNPA has engaged its 211-member publications in more than 60 markets across the country in a campaign designed to heighten public awareness about ESSA, and to focus on efforts and policies aimed at closing the achievement gaps for students of color and low-income students.
Due to the importance of education in the Black community, NNPA members have paid particular attention on the NNPA ESSA awareness campaign; three NNPA members were rewarded for that engagement at the Mid-Winter Conference for their relentless reporting on ESSA.
“I do believe that the last chance anybody has to hold anybody down is education,” said Bobby Henry, the publisher of the Westside Gazette in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who was one of those publishers that received an award for his engagement with the awareness campaign. “The state of Florida is not doing too well in educating our children, so I thought it was out of duty and respect that we do our due diligence to bring awareness to our readers.”
Henry added that the ESSA law and reporting on it helps to hold school districts accountable and he said that it’s also important that more teachers of color are recruited and hired.
Brandon Brooks, the managing editor of the Los Angeles Sentinel, said that education is the key to helping to end poverty in the Black community and all NNPA members are a testament to that.
Danny Bakewell, the publisher of the Los Angeles Sentinel was also rewarded for his newspaper’s engagement with the NNPA ESSA awareness campaign, and Brooks accepted the reward on behalf of the Sentinel.
For numerous reasons, Brooks said he didn’t hesitate to run articles about ESSA and educational equality in the Los Angeles Sentinel—in print and online.
“The content [produced by NNPA Newswire] was there and it was rich and educational and informative. Running the articles has never been too much of a directive, especially when I got the green light,” Brooks said.
Brooks continued: “The goal of the Black Press has always been to advocate for justice for Black people. ESSA is a campaign for social justice and equality in education. It’s our duty to reach out to our students, our kids and to make sure that they have the information to succeed. If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be doing my job.
Freddie Allen, the Editor-In-Chief of the NNPA Newswire, called NNPA publishers “MVPs” of the NNPA team for their work in publishing stories about ESSA.
“Education is a civil rights issue and we must be engaged,” said Allen. “Imagine the Civil Rights Movement without the Black Press. Where would we be today? So, imagine the future of education without the Black Press. That’s why we have to get involved and stay involved with this issue.”
The group, co-founded by billionaire entrepreneur Bill Gates, has been undeniably influential in shifting how states and districts have approached teacher quality over the last decade.
(Education Week receives financial support from the Gates Foundation for coverage of continuous improvement strategies in education. Education Week retains sole editorial control of its content.)
Early results from the teacher evaluation research showed that a mixture of classroom observations, student input, and measures of student growth could provide an accurate picture of teacher performance.
So if Gates has been so influential here, what does it mean that the foundation is pulling out of this teacher evaluation work?
Well, in the immediate sense, probably not too much. The majority of states currently have laws on the books requiring the sorts of teacher evaluation reforms that Gates was championing.
But other factors—mainly, the new federal education law—may soon cause real changes in this space.
Federal Incentives Push State Change
Here’s a bit of back story: While Gates’ MET research fueled interest in using student test scores as part of a teacher’s evaluation, states were already headed in that direction for several other reasons.
Back in 2009, TNTP (formerly called the New Teacher Project) published “The Widget Effect“—a seminal report finding that 99 percent of teachers were being rated as satisfactory. Many began to question the validity of these evaluation systems. At the end of that year, the federal Race to the Top program began offering states incentives to rework their evaluation systems, including by incorporating student test data. (The multiyear MET study got going at right about the same time.)
As of right now, 39 states are using objective student measures (including test scores) in their teacher evaluation systems. That’s up from 15 states in 2009, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Over the last two years, six states—Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oklahoma—have moved away from including student growth measures, according to NCTQ. (And a couple of other states have strengthened their commitment to it.)
Whether more states will back off remains to be seen. But if they do, it’s probably a consequence of the federal education law—and not so much a result of the end of the Gates funding stream.
Sorry, Mike, it’s not. We don’t get to excellence if Ts don’t get fair, accurate feedback & leaders don’t get accurate data on their talent.
And an important side note in any conversation about teacher evaluation: Research shows that even in states that have significantly overhauled their evaluation systems, nearly all teachers continue to be rated as effective.
As the first deadline to submit state plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act rapidly approaches, community stakeholders in Washington, D.C., voice their support and concerns for how city administrators will implement the new law.
Last November, the Department of Education (DOE) issued two firm deadlines for the submission of ESSA state plans—April 3, 2017 and September 18, 2017. The Education Department will conduct a peer review process of the submitted state plans after each of the deadlines.
Following years of the increasingly cumbersome requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the bipartisan-approved ESSA allows state-level programs to continue, and even expand, on the progress that educators, parents, and students have made across the nation in recent years.
Today, high school graduation rates are at all-time highs, dropout rates are at historic lows, and more students are going to college than ever before.
Dr. Elizabeth Primas, the project manager for the National Newspaper Publishers Association’s (NNPA) new ESSA grant, is among those touting the strengths of ESSA.
The NNPA/ESSA Media Grant, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is focused on raising awareness about the education law in the Black community.
“I am excited about the promise of ESSA to effect positive change in our lowest-performing schools, where children have been underserved, undereducated, and for all intent and purposes, forgotten about,” said Primas. “I don’t want to see ESSA derailed by politics before it even gets underway.”
ESSA not only removes many of the federal restrictions regarding K-12 education, returning the authority to states and local school districts, it also requires states to include strategies and innovations in their plans for the nation’s most vulnerable students in the nation’s lowest performing schools.
According Hanseul Kang, the superintendent of the district’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), “only about a quarter of D.C. students are prepared for college and career readiness, and there are serious and persistent gaps among our lowest income students.”
The district’s draft plan states that only “17 percent of its economically disadvantaged students are on track for college and career readiness in mathematics, compared with 54 percent of their peers who are not economically disadvantaged,” said Kang.
Washington, D.C. is one of the 20-plus jurisdictions planning to submit plans by the April 3 deadline. The majority of states are opting for the later submission date.
Although OSSE has complied with the federal requirement for a minimum 30-day comment period, many stakeholders feel that the current plan has issues that should be addressed before the comment period ends at midnight on March 3 and before OSSE’s scheduled submission date of April 3.
At a February 23 community engagement meeting in Washington’s Ward 5, many stakeholders supported waiting until September to allow more input into the plan from the community.
Jeff Schmidt, a D.C. resident and alumna of the University of California at Irvine, is convinced that the district’s plan will harm minority children with its “lower math and proficiency goals for Black and Latino children than for White children for the next 22 years—until 2039. D.C. could easily come up with an education plan that is free of racial pre-judgment,” he said.
David Tansey, a math teacher at McKinley Technology High School in Washington, D.C., is not happy with OSSE’s decision not to include a “well-designed school survey” of high school students as part of its plan.
“McKinley Tech’s typical student grows more than 70 percent [compared to their] peers citywide, the highest level of any DCPS high school,” said Tansey. “OSSE’s plan should not be approved until there is a plan to design and roll out a statistically valid school survey.”
Gary Ratner agreed.
Ratner, the founder and executive director of Citizens for Effective Schools, suggested that, “DCPS should administer the School Climate Assessment Instrument (SCAI) to all DCPS students, teachers and parents. SCAI would be an invaluable tool for identifying each school’s strengths and weaknesses.”
The SCAI can vary in scope from district to district; according to the National Center for Community Schools, the SCAI measures physical, social, affective/emotional, learning and moral indicators when assessing the quality of a school’s climate.
OSSE reported that they met with more than 100 organizations at 50 hosted meetings, before they released their draft on January 30. The ward-based community meetings in Washington, D.C., began February 7 and will end with the last meeting scheduled for February 28. For details, visit the OSSE website at www.osse.dc.gov/essa.
Primas also urged stakeholders to join the NNPA for an ESSA community awareness breakfast on March 24 in Washington, D.C. For details about the breakfast, contact Elizabeth Primas by email at eprimas@nnpa.org.
